Maenad from the wood, and dragged Poseidon out of his deep-sea palace.
The conclaves of Olympus, it appears, are merely nature-myths;
the stately legends clustering about them turn out to be a rather
elaborate method of expressing the fact that it occasionally rains.
The heroes who endured their angers and jests and tragic loves are
delicately veiled allusions to the sun--surely, a very harmless topic
of conversation, even in Greece; and the monsters, 'Gorgons and Hydras
and Chimæras dire,' their grisly offspring, their futile opponents,
are but personified frosts. Mythology--the poet's necessity, the
fertile mother of his inventions--has become a series of atmospheric